Lecture notebooks, 1966 October-December

The only documentation of d'Harnoncourt's studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London is a copy of her M.A. thesis entitled, "The awakening conscience: a study of moral subject-matter in Pre-Raphaelite painting, with a catalogue of pictures in the Tate Gallery." This copy includes footnotes, bibliography and an appendix of catalogue entries. Missing, however, are the list of plates and plates I-XX, which were submitted in a separate binder. As she did for her undergraduate thesis, d'Harnoncourt once again examines works of art that speak to social reform. In her Radcliffe writing, she draws similarities between two poets who although never in contact with one another shared similar responses to the contemporary changes wrought by the French revolution--an observation she felt had been overlooked by contemporaries and later scholars. In her Courtauld study, d'Harnoncourt uses as a springboard to her observations, "The Awakening Conscience," a painting by Holman Hunt that sympathetically portrays the degradation of prostitution. She argues that the "anti-pictorial attitude to painting" practiced by the pre-Raphaelites, although brilliant, was too labor-intensive to last. Yet the combination of such subjects and style successfully appealed to the contemporary Victorian middle class, who according to d'Harnoncourt "loved hard facts, melodramatic novels, and strong sermons, and who understood [Hunt's] picture as a combination of all three."